ARC 2016 – Day 7 – Fancy Seeing You Here! (and other Gybes)

In all of the square miles, in all of the Atlantic..

The latest blog to arrive from Challenger 3 is written by deckhand Andrew and covers the challenges of Saturday 26th November.

Spirits are high as we sail on through our 6th day at sea, despite us losing some ground to our Arch-Nemesis Challenger 2.

Even though there are many millions of square miles of ocean available to ARC participating yachts, we have ended up within 8 nautical miles of our matched rival.

We have lost sight of them by eye and on the AIS (automatic identification system), which reports positions via radio to nearby vessels, on several occasions and yet here we are, together again.

Not Quite a Yankee Doodle

They slowly pulled in front of us through the evening yesterday, mostly owing to us taking down our Yankee #2 headsail and putting up our Yankee #3 due to a small tear in the leech that was spotted by crew member Tomak.

The Yankee #2 is a slightly bigger sail that was more appropriate for the wind conditions we were experiencing, leading to them gaining about a mile an hour on us when we flew the smaller Yankee #3.

Sail repair – during the day and not on a ship.

Kirstie and Peter have been hard at work, through the darkness of the night and the overcast morning to repair the many small nicks found in our Yankee #2 and after many, many man hours the sail was ready to be re-hoisted again at midday.

Let’s Gybe Again

An inter-watch operation was launched to drop our smaller sail and re-hoist the #2 as quickly as possible, and we were almost rewarded by lunch before the Skipper informed us that we would then have to gybe the boat (another 20 minutes work).

To add insult to injury, the Skipper also decided to put back the clocks by one hour, prolonging my watch and everyone’s day after the tiring manoeuvres.

It was some consolation that after the gybe, the Skipper announced that this was the last gybe for a number of days. At last, we could relax and look forward to once again gaining miles on our rival, now just over the horizon ahead of us.

As we tucked into a wonderful lunch of potato salad, crisp bread and the ‘most-off-vegetables-we-could-find’ prepared by our team of two Mothers, Ricky made one more announcement: he had totally changed his mind and we would gybe twice more today…

Andrew, Deckhand
Challenger 3

Posted by: First Class Sailing